For international keynote speaker Bea Boccalandro, this journey started with the purchase of a snowboarding jacket made of 90 per cent recycled materials and with zero carbon footprint.

“She thought that was a pleasant shopping experience, but not much more. She was wrong. It was a lot more,” Ms Boccalandro said of the experience.

“First of all, she wasn’t just in that instance preventing carbon from going into the atmosphere or plastic from going into the ocean. She was helping that brand continue that environmental practice.

“And other brands followed suit. She helped to tilt standard business practices toward putting less plastic in the ocean and less carbon in the atmosphere.”

The Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry was proud to host Ms Boccalandro at a special ESG event, ‘Why ESG is good business’, at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, the first convention centre in the world to be awarded a 6-star green star environmental rating.

Pro-social actions

The author of Do Good at Work: How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing, Ms Boccalandro has more than two decades of experience in helping businesses become more environmentally sustainable and has featured in Harvard Business Review, The Boston Globe and Forbes.

In a thought-provoking presentation, Ms Boccalandro defined ESG as an aspiration to “not make anything worse and do some things better,” or anything a company does to support a societal cause.

She explained this is not necessarily driven by boardroom actions, but the personal impact of ‘prosocial’ actions, however small they may be. Just five minutes or dollars can lead to days of happiness, reorienting behaviour towards contribution.

“It is fuelled by something much more primal, more visceral and semiautomatic,” Ms Boccalandro said.

“I thought that I was making a cognitive decision to pay a premium for a jacket. But actually it may have been the dopamine that bought that jacket. That’s what we’re figuring out.

“There’s a study done in Harvard. [After] a prosocial act, the T-Cell response is stronger, so literally the immune system is stronger.

“What about the sales associate? This is true of him as well, because this is a prosocial act by selling that jacket. But he has an additional advantage, which is that he’s at work, so he has elevated work up to be something more meaningful.

“And this changes everything. This makes work be more fun, more engaged, more productive.”

Because of this ‘subconscious’ impact, Ms Boccalandro said studies show companies with an ESG focus have a triple benefit of increased employee productivity, retention and recruitment.

“When we feel our jobs matter, we perform better and we don’t even know we’re performing better. It feels effortless. It’s like flow.

“[According to a study] the group that did something prosocial increased their productivity by 171 per cent. They didn’t even feel it.”

This then also impacts on the bottom line.

“There’s huge amounts of data on sales. A long-term study published in Harvard Business Review showed the companies that grew the most based on sales were strong in ESG.”

The results were more pronounced for companies that focused on ‘materiality’, or on issues that directly impact the business, Ms Boccalandro said.

An example of this is a publishing company focusing on literacy initiatives or recreational companies contributing to environmental causes.

“Materiality means that you’re focusing on something that your stakeholders care about and, more importantly, directly affects the success of the business.”

Despite the positives, Ms Boccalandro admitted ESG is a fledgling concept and is susceptible to issues like greenwashing, but is adamant it will improve with time.

“A lot of the criticism is well-deserved. We have a company is saying they’re doing things. You look under the hood and there’s nothing there.

“It’s really because [ESG] is young and we haven’t kind of standardised things and held people accountable to what they’re saying.

“It can and it will get better. And frankly, the critique is great because it’s making ESG evolve faster.

“We know, for example, that 10 years ago 25 per cent of consumers looked at a product’s environmental footprint before buying it, and now it’s 50 per cent.

“So this is not going to go away. It might change names, it will change form, it will get better. But ESG is here to stay.”

Expert panel

In helping demystify what ESG means for business, the event also heard from an expert panel about real life examples of ESG across different industries.

• Cotton On Group Chief Financial Officer, Michael Hardwick, spoke of the firm’s ethical framework and the Cotton On Foundation, which started 18 years ago and has evolved to deliver philanthropic missions across the world.
• Stockland Group Social Sustainability Manager, Justine Felton, spoke of how the increasingly “sophisticated” approach from investors, government, customers and employees to understand the business and its approach to ESG is shaping Stockland’s strategic priorities.
• Bendigo Kangan Institute Chief Executive Officer, Sally Curtain, spoke of the Institute’s ‘sustainability on a shoestring’ approach that includes a social procurement element to every spend that has been driving local community benefits
• Tank Managing Director, Jim Antonopoulos, spoke from a small business perspective about how his consultancy “redefined growth” to include ESG impact areas, and how becoming ‘B-Corp certified’ as a high-performing social and accountable operation created value for the business.

Victorian Chamber advocacy

The Victorian Chamber is committed to being a leader in the ESG movement and help our members on their ESG journeys.

Our ESG Hub helps define ESG, offers insights from the Chamber and members, demonstrates how ESG can be integrated into your business strategy, and links to an evolving range of products and initiatives to drive sustainable performance and impact in the workplace.

A great first step is to take our ESG Fit Test.

ESG and the ongoing challenges and opportunities will be a major focus and we will work across this space in ways that will empower, inspire and educate Victorian business into the future.

ESG is also the theme of the 2023 World Chambers Congress to be held here, in Melbourne.